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WASHINGTON – As California’s attorney general, Kamala Harris successfully defended the death penalty in court, despite her past crusade against it.
As a new senator, she proposed to abolish cash bail — a reversal from when she chided San Francisco judges for making it “cheaper” to commit crimes by setting bail amounts too low.
And now, as vice-president and the Democratic presidential nominee, Harris’ campaign insists that she does not want to ban fracking, an oil and gas extraction process, even though that was precisely her position just a few years ago when she first pursued the White House.
Politicians often recalibrate in the face of shifting public opinions and circumstances. Across two decades in elected office and now seeking the presidency for the second time, Harris has not hesitated to stake out expedient and — at times — contradictory positions as she climbed the political ladder. Harris’ litany of policy reversals is opening her to attacks by Republicans and testing the strength of her pitch to voters as a truth-teller who is more credible than former President Donald Trump.
Her shifts, including on matters that she has framed as moral issues, could raise doubts about her convictions as she is reintroducing herself to the public after taking the reins of the campaign from President Joe Biden, who last month dropped out of the race.
In addition to reversing course on fracking and cash bail, Harris has changed tack on issues including health care (she supported a plan to eliminate private health insurance before she opposed it), immigration and gun control.
“She is vulnerable to the charge of flip-flopping, no question about that,” said John Pitney, a professor of political science at Claremont McKenna College in California, who worked as a GOP congressional and political aide in the 1980s. “The trouble for Republicans, to put it lightly” is Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, “do not come to this issue with spotless records.”
In a statement, Harris’ campaign did not address her policy shifts. Instead, a campaign spokesman leaned into her credentials as a San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general to attack Trump.
“During her career in law enforcement, Kamala Harris was a pragmatic prosecutor who successfully took on predators, fraudsters and cheaters like Donald Trump,” said spokesman James Singer.
Trump has changed positions, too
Trump has a well-documented record of falsehoods, shifting positions and outright lies. One of the clearest examples of his penchant for taking all sides of an issue is on abortion, a transition that took him from “very pro-choice” in 1999 to “pro-life” in recent years. He suggested during his 2016 presidential campaign that women who have abortions should be subject to “some form of punishment,” but now says abortion policy should be left up to the states. He has also boasted of appointing three justices to the Supreme Court, paving the way for its landmark 2022 ruling striking down the constitutional right to abortion.
Nevertheless, there is ample incentive for Republicans to attack Harris along similar lines if history is a guide.
Republicans in 2004 savaged then-Sen. John Kerry for voting both for and against the same Iraq War funding bill, which they distilled down to the attack that he “was for it before (he) was against it.” Democrats attacked George H.W. Bush for failing to abide by his “read my lips” vow to not raise taxes.
Such criticism hasn’t always resonated. In 1992, Democratic presidential hopeful Paul Tsongas attacked Bill Clinton, dismissing him days before the New Hampshire primary as a “pander bear” who “will say anything, do anything to get votes.” Clinton defeated Tsongas days later before winning two terms in the White House.
The death penalty
One of Harris’ most pronounced shifts was over the death penalty. During a 2004 inauguration speech after her election as San Francisco’s district attorney, Harris vowed to “never charge the death penalty.” She framed her choice as a moral one.
She stuck to that pledge when a 21-year-old gang member was accused of killing San Francisco Police Officer Isaac Espinoza. Harris announced that she would not seek the ultimate punishment — a decision condemned by police and some fellow Democrats. At the officer’s funeral, Harris was forced to look on as Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein received a standing ovation when she said the death penalty was warranted.
Harris softened her approach four years later, after launching her campaign for California attorney general. Amid a tightly contested race with Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley, a Republican, Harris said she would “enforce the death penalty as the law dictates.” While other Democrats on the ballot cruised to victory , Harris barely won.
She kept that promise. Her office successfully defended the death penalty in court, arguing she was obligated to uphold the law as the state’s top attorney — even as she refused to enforce a referendum that banned gay marriage.
`Blood and guts prosecutor’ turned progressive
As district attorney, Harris zealously approached criminal enforcement matters. While still a candidate, she blasted the progressive incumbent, Terence Hallinan, as a “do nothing prosecutor” and called for taking more aggressive steps to police the homeless. Once in office, she pursued the parents of chronically truant students, sought higher bail amounts and aggressively prosecuted drug crimes, earning her the nickname of “Copala.”
When a scandal erupted at the city’s crime lab involving a drug-skimming evidence technician, her office failed to promptly disclose the problem to defense attorneys, as required. She also sought to continue prosecuting the tainted cases, criticized the judge handling the matter as biased and trying to have her removed from overseeing the cases involving the technician, who had often served as an expert witness.
Harris has said she was unaware of issues with the lab, though emails released in a court case show her top deputies knew there was a problem.
“She was a blood and guts prosecutor,” said Bill Fazio, a longtime San Francisco attorney who ran against Harris in the 2003 district attorney’s race. “My history with her is she never gave away cases.”
As attorney general, Harris continued to take hardline stances on criminal justice matters. She appealed convictions that judges had ordered thrown out. Her office fought a court order mandating the release of state prisoners due to overcrowding. She also opposed legislation requiring her office to investigate shootings involving police and declined to back statewide standards for the use of body cameras by local law enforcement.
Once elected to the Senate in 2016, however, Harris jettisoned many of those positions amid speculation she would pursue the presidency. She sought instead to portray herself as a “progressive prosecutor” and proposed sweeping reforms, including abolishing the cash bail system — which her attorneys had defended in court just months before — and imposing a moratorium on the death penalty.
In May 2020, violent protests erupted in Minneapolis over the police killing of George Floyd, a Black man. A police station was torched and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who is now Harris’ running mate, called in the National Guard to help quell the unrest. In the days that followed, Harris took to the social media site Twitter, now known as X, and urged her followers to “chip in” to a bail fund to help those arrested post bond.
It’s unclear if Harris, who tweeted “End money bail” as a presidential candidate, still supports the idea. She abandoned her primary campaign in 2019 and was picked the next year to join Biden’s ticket. Her campaign declined to directly address the question.
“She believes that we need a system where public safety, not wealth, determines who should stay behind bars following an arrest. Anyone who is a danger to society should be detained regardless of how wealthy they are,” said Singer, the spokesman.
`I did inhale’
Harris also changed positions on two other hot-button issues: marijuana and gun control.
Most Americans live in states where marijuana is legal in some form, and Harris is now the first major party presidential nominee to advocate for marijuana legalization.
But at different junctures of her time in office, she has been an enforcer of cannabis laws and an opponent of legalized use for adults in California.
Though she defended marijuana’s use for medicinal purposes as district attorney, her prosecutors in San Francisco convicted more than 1,900 people on cannabis-related offenses.
In 2010, when she was running to become California’s top law enforcement official, she opposed allowing marijuana sales for recreational use. At the time, she said it would cause confusion in the state’s loosely regulated medicinal marketplace.
When running for reelection as California attorney general, Harris said she did not support legalizing recreational use of marijuana — a position endorsed by her Republican challenger.
By the time she was running for president in 2019, she had reversed course and was even joking about having smoked the drug.
“I did inhale,” she quipped during a radio interview, referring to smoking pot in her college days, twisting a line Bill Clinton used in his 1992 campaign to deflect criticism that he had used the drug.
Earlier this year, she said it’s “absurd” that the federal government classifies marijuana as more dangerous than fentanyl, and she criticized the federal classification of cannabis as “patently unfair.”
Harris has undergone an “evolution in thought on the issue that is representative of the American public at large,” said Morgan Fox, political director for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, or NORML.
With most American adults supporting legalization, Fox said, “it’s not surprising that any particular politician also would.”
Since becoming vice-president, Harris has pulled back from her support for mandatory gun buy-back programs, which helped her stand out in a crowded 2019 Democratic primary. Such policies would force millions of gun owners to sell their AR-15s and similar firearms to the government, a proposal that found little support among other Democrats or gun safety advocates.
She now advocates for more moderate and politically popular proposals, including universal background checks on gun sales and “red flag” laws that generally allow family members or law enforcement officers to seek a court order restricting gun access to those posing an immediate risk to themselves or public safety.
“She’s a political animal, there’s no question about it,” said Geoff Brown, a former San Francisco public defender who knew Harris during her time as a Bay Area prosecutor. “But you don’t get to be president unless you are one.”
